That doesn't sound like a taint error. It sounds like bad XML. That code value is a 'left arrow' (<). You might get an error like that if somewhere in your data you had something like '<<something '. Does my script work if you turn off 'taint'? If it does, then the next thing I would look for is something like an external entity in a DTD that is trying to import a file with a '<' character in the name....